


Far From Home

by ncfan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Bechdel Test Pass, Canon Speculation, F/F, Gap Filler, Gen, Guilt, Introspection, POV Female Character, Pre-Canon, Spoilers, Triggers, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-01-31
Packaged: 2018-09-21 07:17:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9537575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Getting off of Mandalore had taken two months. Getting on track would take two years.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [CN/TW: Sabine’s mindset during this time period, which includes internalized victim-blaming and self-loathing.]

Getting off of Mandalore had taken them two months, because it was not _nearly_ so simple as grabbing a shuttle and taking off, and Sabine had spent way too much time in denial before blaster fire and the ISC popping up at every turn had finally forced her to face the facts. At least, Sabine supposed, that was how Ketsu would have put it, and she… she wasn’t entirely wrong. It hadn’t been simple. It hadn’t been easy. It…

She rolled her helmet over in her hands, traced the outlines of the clan markings with her fingertips.

“Hey,” Ketsu called from the pilot’s chair. Sabine could feel her friend’s eyes on her. “Don’t zone out on me, okay? Sleeping’s fine—I wouldn’t _mind_ it if you got some sleep,” she added pointedly. “But we’re both gonna have to be sharp when we drop out of hyperspace.”

Sabine nodded sharply, forcing herself to meet Ketsu’s gaze squarely, and not through the veil of her long black hair. “I’m fine.” She stared past Ketsu, to the bright blue slipstream of hyperspace. “Where are we heading?”

Ketsu’s purple eyes (Sabine had always admired their vivid color, though lately they were too piercing for comfort) narrowed. No words, but words weren’t really needed. Sabine could tell what Ketsu was thinking easily enough: ‘ _You should have been asking that the moment we took off, little sister.’_ Yes, Sabine supposed she should have. The lapse was… She didn’t have much excuse for it. She’d just had other things on her mind.

_My mother just…_

“Nar Shaddaa,” Ketsu said finally. “It’s in Hutt space, so the Empire will probably think twice about following us there in force, and the Supercommandos won’t follow us at all.” She smirked. “There’s plenty of employment opportunities for girls who speak Huttese and know their way around a blaster.”

“Yeah, so long as they don’t figure out how old we _aren’t._ ”

“Hey, nobody would think I was fourteen just by looking at me.” It was true. At a little over six feet tall, and with a deep voice and sharp, well-defined facial features, Ketsu had been looking more like a twenty-something than a teenager ever since she hit puberty. “You’re the one who’s gonna have trouble in that area, not me.”

Ketsu looked years older than she actually was. Meanwhile, Sabine was twelve, and apart from her height, she looked it. Right now, she felt it, too.

_My mother just…_

The words shriveled up in Sabine’s throat, and all conversation died. Maybe Ketsu felt it, too. Or maybe she didn’t. She hadn’t left anyone behind on Mandalore; she didn’t have any family. She’d told Sabine as much, when they’d first become friends— _“I joined the Academy because they were offering me steady meals; nothing more complicated than that. …The classes aren’t that bad, I guess. Learning more about mixing chemicals for explosives has been fun; I bet it’s been fun for you, too!”_

Ketsu joined the Academy for steady meals, for a steady roof over her head. That was a tale many of Sabine’s classmates had told; Sabine was actually something of a rarity, a student from a family and a clan still relatively intact after everything that had happened during the Clone Wars. Intact… That _was_ a funny way of putting it now, wasn’t it.

_My family just…_

Maybe Sabine and Ketsu would have had an easier time getting off of Mandalore if the former had kept wearing her Academy uniform, and not significantly more conspicuous armor. The uniform might have afforded less protection, but there had been enough happening on Mandalore, enough turmoil, that two cadets in uniform roaming the streets probably wouldn’t have drawn nearly as much attention as one cadet in uniform, and another in full, very distinctive armor. Looking back, it seemed almost certain that they would have had an easier time staying under the ISC’s radar if Sabine had worn her uniform, instead of the armor she wore even now. And if she was wrong, and the ISC had cornered them anyways…

Well. Some people might say that Sabine Wren dying at the hands of a weapon she built was no more than she deserved. It would have punched through a uniform more quickly and more cleanly than it would armor. Her corpse would have been better-looking, and just as silent. Maybe her clan would have liked that better than a Sabine Wren who was still alive, a Sabine Wren who was still screaming at the top of her lungs even when the only one who listened was one of her classmates.

Sabine wiped dust off of the eye slits of her helmet. There was blood still splattered on the body of her armor; she knew even without looking that it hadn’t flaked away. The blood matched the color of her helmet, its deep burgundy color, though it stood out starkly against the rest of it, white with gold accents, as her clan wore.

_“Why white?” Her aunt’s mouth twitched, though only for a moment, before she reassumed the serious-verging-on-stern mien she wore even with close kin. “Simple. White serves as perfect camouflage for arctic and sub-arctic conditions—“_

_“Except in summer,” Sabine’s brother broke in, grinning, “when_ someone _won’t let us switch to green or brown.”_

_Their aunt silenced him with a glare, and went on, “—And it allows us to advance on targets undetected, if we are quiet enough about it. As for the accents, gold serves because it makes our clan markings clearly visible up close without being too salient from a distance. Of course, if your mother has her way, your helmet will make you rather too visible in our native conditions.” Though there was no real anger to her voice, there was an edge there, keen as a vibroblade._

_From the far corner of the room, Sabine’s mother snorted as she inspected the paint job on the helmet in her hands. “We’ve had this talk before. You’re repeating yourself.”_

_“If you would just paint over the body of it with white,” Sabine’s aunt insisted, in an almost wheedling tone. “Or if you’d let me do it. You wouldn’t have to change the color on the clan markings; I don’t really think it’s conspicuous enough out in the snow to matter. I keep telling you—“_

_“And I keep telling_ you _, nobody’s messing with the paint job on my helmet,” Sabine’s mother told her bluntly._

_Sabine’s brother caught her eye and winked; she smiled back. This was an old disagreement between the two women, and though they no longer hashed it out with any real venom, they still went back to the old disagreement at the first opportunity. Sabine’s brother thought they must enjoy fighting with one another too much to give it up._

_“Sabine.” At that clear call, Sabine turned to face her mother. She was holding the helmet out for her daughter to take, and her smile was cool as a balmy summer afternoon. “What once was mine is now yours. Take it, and wear it proudly as a daughter of Mandalore.”_

This was the armor she had forged with her family. The only piece that had not been made specifically for her was the helmet, and that was handed down to her from her mother. Her father had done the same thing for his brother when he had forged his armor, had given him one of his old helmets. It was a tradition for their branch of the clan, Sabine guessed, or her parents were at least trying to make it a tradition.

Her family had made this armor with her, had guided her every step of the way. They’d made this armor with her, and now…

_Do I even have the right to wear this anymore?_

A good Mandalorian was supposed to uphold their vows. That meant honoring their obligations, and standing with their family. That was what Sabine’s family had always taught her, stressing those things over even the wearing of the armor, and proficiency in combat. Sabine was supposed to honor her obligations; once sworn, she could not be forsworn. Sabine was supposed to stand with her family, even if it meant her death. A proud daughter of Mandalore could do no less. Her honor was at stake if she failed to do these things, and her failure would mean shame for her family.

Except… Except no one had ever taught Sabine what to do if she could not fulfill one half of her vows without breaking the other. No one ever prepared Sabine for the day when honoring her obligations would mean that her hands ran red with the blood of her kin. They’d made it seem so simple, but no one had ever told her all the ways those things could conflict. No one ever told her that a day like this would come.

And no one had ever told her that rather than stand with her, her family might leave her to her fate instead.

_What’s a Mandalorian who can’t go back to Mandalore?_

Beneath the armor her family made, Sabine wondered if she might not just break apart like shattered glass, if she ever took it off again.

_My family just…_

They’d given her this armor, and she’d given them death. She gave them death, and when she tried to stop it, they…

_My family just…_

She picked herself up, slowly, carefully (wouldn’t want to miss any of the pieces; a weapon wouldn’t work properly without all of its pieces, _would_ it), and sat herself down in the chair next to Ketsu’s. She said nothing, touched none of the instruments, just stared straight ahead into roiling blue hyperspace, and tried not to think about the aurorae of her home. Ketsu’s eyes burned holes into the side of her head, and Sabine didn’t turn.

“Hey, Sabine.” Ketsu’s voice didn’t run to softness very often. She might not have been brought up all her life in the warriors’ tradition, but she had the sort of hard core to her that even Sabine’s mother and aunt would have approved of. But Ketsu was like Sabine—still a kid, for everything she’d done. Her voice could soften still, grow uncertain. “Your family…”

“Ketsu, I…” _I don’t want to talk about what happened._

“Just forget them,” Ketsu said bluntly, and Sabine turned and stared at her, blinking in shock. The older girl smirked humorlessly. She reached over and put her hand on Sabine’s shoulder, so gently, but still, Sabine flinched. Ketsu pretended not to notice, but Sabine could still see the hurt in her eyes, and again, she looked away. “Forget them, Sabine. If they weren’t going to stand up to the Empire even when they started using those _things_ …” Ketsu sucked in a deep, uneven breath. “Just forget them, Sabine. It’s not like we can go back anymore, anyways. You’ll never have to see them again.”

Something like a howl, one part rage and one part despair, echoed in Sabine’s mind, reverberated in her bones, but only she could hear it. _Yeah, that’s right. I can never go back there again. Because of those_ things _I built._

“Anyway, we have to keep pressing forward.” If Ketsu didn’t sound quite as confident as her words implied, she didn’t let that stop her from going on, “If we get to be good enough bounty hunters, the Black Sun might pick us up. We’d never have to worry about the Empire catching us, then.”

Once, Sabine’s father had told her that bounty hunters tended to die young. Bounty hunters attached to a large criminal organization like the Black Sun were no exception; if anything, this rule tended to apply even more to them. _‘Bounty hunters have no honor, Sabine, and that tends to catch up to them, one way or another.’_ But when given the chance to fight, her father had chosen not to. He was a warrior, and had shied away from the fight. Ketsu had stood by Sabine; she was the only one who had.

“Get some sleep.” That note of firmness in Ketsu’s voice brooked no disobedience, and Sabine didn’t have it in her to fight right now, anyways. “It’s going to be a while before we reach Nar Shaddaa, and you didn’t sleep last night—don’t think I didn’t notice.” When Sabine opened her mouth ( _Guess I_ do _have a little bit of fight left in me after all_ ), Ketsu glared and cut her off, saying, “Sabine, I _really_ don’t like the way you start talking when you haven’t slept in a few days.”

The banked annoyance in Ketsu’s voice registered to Sabine far less than the edges of worry did, half-buried though they might be. She drew a deep breath, and nodded. “’Kay. Wake me up if you need me to take the controls for a while.”

Ketsu snorted. “I’ll be fine. Unlike someone I know, I _did_ sleep last night. Just…” Her face crumpled a little bit, lines digging furrows in her forehead and around her mouth. “…Just get some sleep, Sabine. Please.”

As Sabine got up from the co-pilot’s chair and settled down on the cot in the back of the shuttle, her stomach began to churn, aching so badly she thought she might be sick. She curled up into a ball, gritting her teeth, angry at herself.

_Forget… Yeah, it might be nice to just… forget._

Somehow, Sabine doubted she would be quite that lucky.

-0-0-0-

They had made a tidy profit selling the shuttle, once they got to Nar Shaddaa. Ketsu had grumbled about how they probably could have gotten a better deal if they hadn’t been in such a hurry to get rid of it, but personally, Sabine wasn’t willing to hold on to it longer for the sake of haggling. The sooner they got rid of this _very_ tangible link between them and the Empire, the better. And they’d made enough money to rent out a room in a flophouse while they started looking for bounties, so what did it matter?

Sabine had never lived in a flophouse before—indeed, before those two months she spent on the run, she’d never lived anywhere but her family’s home or the Academy dormitories, both of which were rather nicer than the average home—so she guessed she’d just have to take Ketsu’s word for it when the older girl called the place “a dump, but not a completely irredeemable dump, I guess.” The fact that they only had to share the bathroom with one of their neighbors and not the whole floor apparently put it at a cut well above most of the places Ketsu had lived before entering the Academy.

“Okay, I _really_ don’t want to know about all the places you’ve lived if _this_ is better than most of them.”

“Yeah, you probably don’t.”

Sabine would be lying if she said her first glimpse of their new home had impressed her very much. It was a single room—there was a door off to the side that led to the bathroom they shared with their neighbor, which fortunately _did_ lock from their side. There were two pallets rolled up in the far corner of the room, made up of cloth that had probably once been white, but was not faded to a dingy gray, and dotted with some suspicious-looking stains. The floor and walls were made of the same dull, wavy gray metal, solid enough, but unforgiving. There was no kitchen space, no refrigerator. There wasn’t any furniture, not even a chair. There wasn’t even a first-aid kit. Yeah, Sabine definitely didn’t want to know what the other places Ketsu had lived in had been like.

But… But it was a safe haven from the Empire, even if the flophouse as a whole looked like it had seen some stabbings in its lifetime. It was a place Sabine could lie down and sleep, sleep every night the way Ketsu wanted her to. It was a place where they could plot out their future, such as it was. It would do.

And when it didn’t do, when it was too plain, too hard, too cold, too _empty_ for Sabine to bear, she went outside of the flophouse and stood at the railing overlooking one of the major traffic lanes for ships arriving on and leaving the planet. Sabine had never lived somewhere so crowded in her life—even where the Imperial Academy was located hadn’t been this crowded. Of course, nowhere in Mandalorian space boasted an ecumenopolis, a world where the entire surface was given over to a city. No matter where Sabine went, she would find no wilderness, and she would find no air clean and clear as the air where she had grown up. (She was almost glad Nar Shaddaa was as polluted as it was, even if the air was perpetually permeated with a foul, sharp chemical odor, and that the light pollution was so complete that the sky was never as dark as the night sky of her home. At least she couldn’t look up and see that the stars were different than the stars she had grown up with.)

Nar Shaddaa was crowded, polluted, cold and dirty. Sabine couldn’t walk anywhere without being stared at, without being jostled by someone. She felt constantly as though she was being watched, primarily because she _was_ constantly being watched, even if it wasn’t by someone looking to drag her back to Mandalore for trial and execution. But when she stood at the railing, and looked out over the cityscape, she saw something that made her forget it, if only for a moment.

There were all the lights, this glittering sea of earthbound stars in a city that never slept, pinpricks of white and gold and red and blue, pink and purple and green and orange, winking and sparkling through rolling banks of smog. Sometimes, Sabine caught herself looking for constellations, and she could almost smile at herself, before she remembered where she was, and why she was there.

A week after the two girls moved in, Sabine borrowed a pair of scissors from their neighbor.

“You’re cutting your hair?” Ketsu couldn’t hide her surprise when she looked through the open bathroom door to see Sabine hacking away at her hair.

“Uh-huh.” Sabine typically wore her hair a couple of inches past her shoulders, long enough that she could braid it or knot it back, as per the Academy dress code. Back at the Academy, you either wore your hair above your chin, or long enough that it could be tied back. At the time, Sabine hadn’t liked the idea of wearing her hair so short. Of course, she hadn’t liked wearing it up, either, and upon leaving the Academy, she’d started wearing it loose whenever she could. But now, it was longer than it had ever been, nearly halfway down her back, and though her hair was just as straight and fine as it had ever been, it was starting to get annoying.

More than that, she needed a change.

She’d expected Ketsu wouldn’t cross over the threshold into the bathroom with her. Ketsu had always given Sabine her space when the latter was working on an art project, and this was pretty much the same thing. Her body was the canvas, not a wall or, you know, an _actual canvas_ , but otherwise, there was no difference.

But Ketsu liked to be unpredictable sometimes, too.

“Let me do that.” In one swift stride, Ketsu was standing at Sabine’s side, holding her hand out for the scissors.

Sabine frowned at her, clutching the scissors to her chest. “I can do it.”

Ketsu smiled back, more gently than Sabine had seen in months. The smile softened her face and glittered in her eyes, and Sabine did feel her heart skip a beat at it, even if it did so more quietly than before all this had begun. “Do you want an even cut? It’ll be easier if someone else does it, and I promise I won’t charge.”

Inside, the part of Sabine that wanted to do this herself warred with the part of her that wanted her hair to come out looking relatively neat, and, in the end, the latter won. Silently, her jaw set, Sabine handed the scissors over to her friend. She was being ridiculous, she knew, and at least this way her hair would come out looking nice, but it still rankled to admit that she couldn’t do this herself.

“How short do you want it?” Ketsu asked curiously as she took stock of what Sabine had already cut off. “As short as mine?”

“No,” Sabine said rather too quickly, and Ketsu snickered. Ketsu kept her hair very short—usually just a short fuzz covering her scalp, though her hair had gotten longer over the last couple of months too, and more resembled a very short pixie cut nowadays. It was a good look for Ketsu, a _very_ good look, Sabine would admit, but not the kind of look that worked for Sabine. “How about…” She pursed her lips, twining one of the few locks of hair she hadn’t gotten to yet in her hand. “…Just past my chin.”

Sabine spotted Ketsu’s nodding reflection in the mirror. “Okay, you want a bob. I can do that. Just hold still, or it might wind up looking like you tried hacking it off with a blunt knife.”

A sound that wasn’t a laugh bubbled up in Sabine’s throat. “Knowing you,” she remarked, and the jaunty note in her voice was almost sincere, “it’ll wind up looking like that anyways.”

“And just for that, I’m giving you a buzz cut now.”

“Ahh, don’t you dare!”

Ketsu laughed brightly, and for a moment, Sabine could forget where she was.

In the silence of their dim bathroom, Ketsu ran her fingers slowly through Sabine’s hair, presumably checking for tangles. Sabine had to resist the urge to lean back into the older girl, had to tell herself that she had to hold still. As Ketsu’s fingernails raked over Sabine’s scalp, a hard lump formed in her throat. Her eyes stung. Long locks of black hair lay in clumps on the floor, fluttering slightly as the vent sputtered into life. It had been so long since touch had felt so welcome.

“It’s a shame,” Ketsu murmured. “I liked your hair long.”

“I don’t, anymore,” Sabine said softly, staring down at the ground.

Eventually, Ketsu was done. Heedless of her comments on how straight Sabine’s hair was or wasn’t, Sabine looked over her new haircut in the mirror. She pressed her hands, palms flat, against the sides of her neck as she did so, wincing at how quickly her pulse raced.

The mirror was a warped, cloudy thing, the glass speckled with a thousand impurities. It did not grant the looker a clear reflection, and instead presented a blurred, indistinct image. Sabine looked at herself in the mirror, most of the hair shorn from her head, and swallowed hard.

She hadn’t been expecting this, hadn’t been thinking about it at all, but with her hair cut to her chin like this, not quite brushing her shoulders, she looked almost exactly like her mother. With the mirror’s cloudy surface blurring her features, she was almost her mother in miniature. Oh, Sabine knew the resemblance wasn’t perfect. She was too short, too slight. Her hair was finer, her eyes the wrong color. Whether because of her youth or because she’d inherited her facial structure from her father’s side of the family, her face was cast in much softer, more rounded lines than her mother’s.

But there was her mother’s face staring back at her out of the mirror, the one thing she couldn’t outrun no matter how fast she ran. _Mother would be insulted if she could see this._ For one wild moment, Sabine wanted to scratch her cheeks to ribbons, as if she could peel her skin away like a mask and find a new, unfamiliar face underneath. A face that didn’t belong to her, a face that wasn’t the face of a girl who had given her family death and shame, a girl whose family had cast her out.

It wouldn’t work, and Sabine’s hands stayed firmly planted on her neck.

“How does it look?”

“It… looks good. Thanks, Ketsu.”

That night, Sabine finally scrubbed the blood off of her armor. She’d let it sit there long enough, rust-red speckles on white. Much of it had already flaked off, and what remained washed off easily enough, but still, it didn’t quite look _clean_ when she was done.

-0-0-0-

“It just figures.” Though Ketsu might have been rolling her eyes, there was no mistaking the fond amusement in her voice. “Our first big bounty, and you blow half of your share on hair dye and paint. You never change, Sabine.”

Their first two months on Nar Shaddaa, they weren’t able to pick up any bounties but those placed on small-time crooks, and accordingly, the payouts were small. More well-established bounty hunters got to the more valuable targets on the open market first, and most clients didn’t want to discuss things with a couple of kids they’d never heard of. The money they’d made selling the shuttle dwindled away (there _were_ things Sabine and Ketsu both needed to buy, after all), and with only their meager takes to support themselves, things got tight fast. Sabine in particular was learning something Ketsu had already known from life before the Academy—what it was like to be hungry all the time (And she suspected that this feeling would persist). She missed the food she’d eaten at home. She’d be lying if she said there was a wide variety of flavors in what she’d eaten with her family, but she missed eating food that tasted of _home_. What food they got here wasn’t the same, and there wasn’t really enough to banish that feeling of hunger.

Even so, when they finally made enough credits on one of their bounties that there was still plenty left over after rent had been taken care of, Sabine couldn’t help but splurge a little.

Their neighbor had had a fit when she opened the bathroom door on her side to find the bathroom flooded with the acrid, overpowering odor of hair dye, only calming down when Sabine assured her that the smell would go away given time, and that the neon pink dye in the sink would wash off. Sabine had never dyed her hair before. Doing so was against Academy dress code, and enough of her relatives thought it improper that she probably wouldn’t have done it even if she hadn’t joined the Academy. She’d wanted to dye her hair for years now, though. Black was kind of boring as far as hair colors went, and her hair wasn’t even the shiny blue-black some of her distant cousins possessed. It was just… black, plain, boring black, and Sabine could do with a change. Pink had always been her favorite color, anyways.

Next came the spray paint, and the set of oil paints she had bought.

For as long as she could remember, Sabine had loved painting. This love allegedly went further back then Sabine could remember, actually. Her brother had once told her the story of how, when she was a toddler, she’d gotten into her father’s paints and decided the walls of their home would make a wonderful canvas for pink and red and purple handprints. The story was notable primarily because, instead of being furious, their mother had only laughed before getting a bucket and water to clean it all off, but the story really was illustrative. Sabine loved to paint.

In the realm of time Sabine _could_ remember, she’d first used watercolor paints, rather clumsily coloring in the blocky pictures in her coloring books (She wondered briefly if her parents had kept any of her old coloring books or thrown them away, but found she didn’t really want to speculate). She still liked to mess around with watercolors from time to time, but she’d never been able to get the colors to pop like she wanted them to, so she mostly painted with watercolors out of nostalgia, these days. It was calming, on occasions when she needed to calm down.

 _“So you like your painting, Sabine?”_ Her father’s voice came to her as a ghostly echo, quieter and yet more well-defined than the muffled snatches of conversation Sabine caught sometimes coming from the people living above them. _“I’m glad. Alright, alright, I can see the way you’re looking at me. Yes, I would have liked one of my children to be a sculptor like me, but painting is a worthy art. More traditional, too; should please your mother, eh?”_ He’d winked at her, and any attempt of Sabine’s to smile at the memory just ended in a dull, ragged pain in her chest.

But memories couldn’t taint Sabine’s love of bright colors and mixing paints; she wouldn’t let them. When she’d discovered oil paints and spray paints, well, the vivid colors were nothing short of a revelation, and they were never going to stop being a source of revelations. Yes, she’d been a painting fiend since she was small. Yes, she would be a painting fiend until the day she died; Sabine figured that if she didn’t die with a blaster in hand, it would probably be a paintbrush or a bottle of spray paint instead. And no, she wasn’t going to forget about Ketsu rolling her eyes at Sabine’s sheer love of paint, only for Ketsu to later get the strangest look on her face when Sabine graffitied an alley wall, and demanded that Sabine teach her how to do that too.

It seemed bad memories would drive her to do something else, though.

All too easily could Sabine imagine the way her family would react if they could see what she was doing now. Her mother and her aunt would both be furious. Her father might be angry, too. Her more distant relations would mutter, and even her brother might be a bit offended. Dyeing her hair was one thing. Certain of her relatives might have thought it improper, but in the end, dyed hair could be hidden under a helmet. This was something else entirely.

_It will still be white underneath. Do you really think you can hide it so easily? Do you really think you can erase it, just like that?_

But Sabine gritted her teeth as she pulled on her safety mask and protective glasses, as she pressed a hand to the white breastplate sitting on the floor in front of her. Her family wasn’t here, and it was likely she would never see any of them again. She’d given them death and shame, and they had cast her out. Why should any of them care what she did now? Why should _she_ care what she thought? Any irritation they evinced over what she was doing to her armor would be nothing compared to everything else that had passed between them.

First came the spray paint to serve as a base. She’d picked out a deep pinkish-maroon color for that, not quite the same color as the base color of her helmet, but close enough that most wouldn’t notice that unless they looked hard. The white was swallowed up, the gold swallowed up, and Sabine felt… She wasn’t sure what she felt. Not free. Not quite.

Once the spray paint had dried, Sabine broke out her new set of oil paints, and frowned at her newly painted armor. Just leaving it like it was, spray-painted pinkish-maroon, that wasn’t going to be good. It might not be the white and gold her clan favored, but that color… No. Sabine wasn’t going to go around wearing armor that looked like that. It was so familiar it cut, though the blade might be shaped a bit differently.

Though Sabine was slightly less eager to admit to this than her love of paints, she’d always been fond of rainbows and aurorae. She saw the latter often enough at home, ghostly green and blue and violet curtains of light that brought welcome, gorgeous illumination to a sky dimmed so long in winter. She never saw an aurora here on Nar Shaddaa; they were too close to the equator for that. That seemed like a good place to start.

Sabine swirled light, spring green and neon blue over one of her elbow guards, though the former needed a couple of coats before she stopped seeing the darker base underneath. Orange and yellow elsewhere, light pink and lavender, black and white, bright scarlet and dull, gunmetal gray. If she was at home, anyone with eyes, down to the smallest child, could spy her coming from miles off, but she wasn’t at home anymore.

She paused when she came to her left pauldron. Instead of swirls of bright color, she painted three white lilies with deep green stems. Sabine was pretty sure she’d seen them on a class slideshow during her time at the Academy, though she couldn’t quite remember when, or in what context. She just remembered what she’d thought at the time, that her home was too cold for flowers like those.

“I like it,” Ketsu approved when Sabine showed her the new paint job on her armor. “It’s very ‘you.’ Are you going to repaint your helmet, too?” she asked, resting her hand on top of said helmet.

Sabine bit her lip. “…No, I don’t think so. Not right now.”

The helmet’s color scheme didn’t clash nearly as much with the rest of her armor now. That was something. The clan markings on her helmet were still clearly visible. That was something else.

 _I should just cover them up._ Anyone searching for fugitive Sabine Wren probably knew what kind of clan markings would be visible on her armor. She’d already painted over the markings on the rest of her armor; now, there was just this left. Leaving the clan markings visible was just making it easier for the Empire to find her.

_“Take it, and wear it proudly.”_

Sabine did not wear her armor particularly proudly these days. It hadn’t actually seen that much use before she left the Academy, and she wore it now for the same reason she’d worn it then. Simply put, it was safer to have the armor on than have it off. And asides from her blasters, it was all she had of home. An exile she might have been, but hers was still the blood of Mandalore. She would have loved to forget. She knew she couldn’t.

 _I’m still their blood. There isn’t anything that can change that._ And if Sabine couldn’t tell whether she was happy about that or not, at the very least, no one from the Empire would bother to ask, if they caught up with her.

-0-0-0-

“Ketsu, I don’t think we should go after this guy,” Sabine muttered, as she looked dubiously over the bounty intel Ketsu had picked up.

Curiously, but without any real fire, Ketsu raised an eyebrow and retorted, “And why not? The payout’s pretty good.”

“Yeah, the payout’s good, but the description says he’s on the run from the Empire. It doesn’t…” Sabine counted the number of days it had taken them to get off of Mandalore in her head, the number of times the ISC had nearly shot them both down where they stood. “…It doesn’t feel right.”

“Sabine, the Empire puts bounties out on a lot of people,” Ketsu pointed out reasonably. “Not all of them are defectors or informants or rebels. A lot of them are just common criminals who pissed off the wrong governor or admiral.” She frowned, and if Sabine wasn’t imagining the unhappiness in her frown, Ketsu certainly didn’t acknowledge it as she went on, “We’re trying to survive here. We can’t be choosy about who we go after; if we only ever went after the worst of the worst, we’d starve, and you know it. Besides, if we nab this guy, we’ll be good to go for rent for the next three months, and maybe we can stop eating freeze-dried MREs.” She leaned forward and poked Sabine in the chest with one finger. “ _You_ could stand to eat something a bit more substantial than freeze-dried MREs. You’re not looking so good right now, little sister.”

“Neither are you,” Sabine rejoined, but still, she nodded slowly. Ketsu was right. They really couldn’t afford to be choosy about who they went after, and who they didn’t. They weren’t on Mandalore anymore, and it wasn’t like Sabine could just call up her family and ask them to wire her some credits. Neither of them had any safety net if they ran out of money and couldn’t make rent on their room.

 _It’ll be alright_ , she told herself. She rested her head on Ketsu's shoulder wearily. _We just have to focus on surviving._

-0-0-0-

In the end, Ketsu must have taken that phrase, that ‘focus on surviving’ bit more to heart than Sabine, because when Ketsu left, it took nearly a week for it to sink in for Sabine that Ketsu wasn’t coming back.

Their latest job had gone bad. Their client hadn’t told them all the details, had turned out to be much more dangerous than either Sabine or Ketsu could have realized when they first got in contact with her, and oh, Sabine should have realized something was wrong the moment the client offered to pay them up front. She’d heard it from the few older bounty hunters who were willing to talk to them, it usually wasn’t a good sign if the client was paying you before you nabbed the target, but they were hungry, and hunger had made them more desperate, and more trusting, than was wise.

Ketsu had split when things went south, taking the money with her, and even as Sabine had to run, she still kept expecting her friend to show back up. Still kept waiting to hear Ketsu’s laugh, to turn and smile to see her jump down from a fire escape and tell her she’d found a place where they could hide while they formulated their next move. She wanted that, wanted to believe it would happen.

But it wasn’t. Ketsu had left her holding the bag, left Sabine to deal with their very angry client and her very angry goons, and now Sabine found herself taking what little money she had and doing much the same as she’d done a year ago: getting off of Nar Shaddaa as fast as she possibly could. Fleeing a planet was something that was becoming much more familiar to her than it ought to have been, and this time, she couldn’t even claim the desire to spare her clan any more misery than she’d already brought them as an excuse.

She found passage on a freighter whose pilot wasn’t interested in asking questions, just in getting his shipment of spice to the next port of call. So long as Sabine agreed to help with the maintenance of the ship while they were in transit, she didn’t have to pay much to stay on the ship until he got to his destination and could drop her off.

Mercifully, the pilot wasn’t too interested in asking questions, either. Sabine didn’t think she could have answered any question he gave her, even such an innocuous one as asking after her age. She couldn’t answer questions right now. She could barely even bear to _talk_.

 _Is this all there is_? she wondered one night, holed up in the little room where she, well, didn’t sleep. Not much. She mostly lied awake on her bunk, listening to the steady hum of the engine and holding her helmet close to her chest. _Is there no one I can trust?_ Her heart hammered painfully in her chest, bile rising in her throat even she clamped her mouth down over a scream. _Am I just… Am I just supposed to be alone?_

Ketsu had just…

Why, after everything they had gone through on Mandalore, after Ketsu had been the only person who would stand by her, would Ketsu just leave her?! Why… _I thought… I thought she really…_

Sabine stared up at the dark ceiling, clutching her helmet to her chest like a small child would a stuffed animal or a favorite blanket. Maybe… Maybe she should have been expecting this. They had to survive, and Ketsu might have just thought that that would become impossible if she didn’t leave Sabine holding the bag. Who knows, maybe Sabine would have done the same thing to Ketsu if their positions had been reversed, or if they had run into another bad spot somewhere down the line. How was she supposed to know otherwise?

Maybe this really was all there was for her. She’d betrayed her family long before they betrayed her, after all. If betrayal was going to follow her wherever she went, maybe it would be better if she was just alone. If she didn’t come to care about anyone, and there was no one who cared about her. Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad.

Sabine turned her face to the wall. At some point during the night, she finally fell asleep. When the morning came, she’d pretend she hadn’t heard screaming while she dreamed, and she would pretend that she hadn’t woken up to find her cheeks damp to the touch.

-0-0-0-

Sabine still continued to find work as a bounty hunter as she flitted from spaceport to spaceport, planet to planet. She was also discovering that the time the Academy had taken teaching her languages (Huttese, Shyriiwook, Rodian, Aqualish, and Binary, among others) in preparation for a “glorious” career in espionage definitely came in handy when bounties were thin on the ground. For all that many people turned their nose up at a translator with no license, there were plenty more who couldn’t afford a licensed translator’s fees, or could but didn’t hire one owing to their activities requiring a somewhat more _discreet_ translator. Those who required the services of a discreet translator tended to care rather less about the fact that their translator was barely a teenager than those who didn’t.

Leaving Hutt space meant traveling to worlds where the Empire tended to have a presence, even if only a token presence, even if the Outer Rim was dotted with sparsely populated backwaters whose only point of interest was the local crime syndicate’s hideout. Traveling to worlds where the Empire had a presence, even only a token presence, meant keeping her head down and staying away from any official-looking buildings, or any major ports of call, for that matter. It meant keeping her mouth shut when she saw stormtroopers hassling civilians, when she saw somebody being carried off in binders, when she had to listen to reporters spewing propaganda on the HoloNet.

A good Mandalorian was supposed to respect strength. Only the strongest could rule, or so her mother had told her. But Sabine had never felt less like a Mandalorian, never felt less like herself, when she sat there, watched the Empire go about the business of enslaving the galaxy and oppressing its people, and did nothing. Even on Mandalore, she had done _something_ , even if she had accomplished approximately nothing in the process. But now?

_What am I supposed to do, anyways? I already tried fighting the Empire, and look where it got me. Look at everything I lost trying to fight the Empire. I fought and lost. I tried to make up for what I’d done, but I couldn’t even do that. What can I do now that won’t just get me the same results it got me then?_

But still, something in her blood began to burn when she watched, and was yet silent.

Sabine Wren was a drifter, a Mandalorian without a clan, without a people to call her own. She moved through the stars, through the solar systems, through the spaceports and the streets, walked among the peoples of the galaxy, but they all seemed very far away. She was right there with them, walking the same streets and traveling down the same hyperspace routes, but they were all very remote, very separate. It was almost like she was a ghost passing through the realms of the living. No one paid her much mind unless she did something so attention-grabbing that they _had_ to turn and look. Otherwise, they just ignored her.

It was for the best, she supposed. She was a fugitive from the Empire, and had no clan to protect her if things went wrong. How could she trust anyone who approached her, anyways? Everyone was just trying to survive out on the Outer Rim, and if that meant turning in a fugitive or ditching said fugitive when associating with her got to be too dangerous, who knew what anyone in that situation would do? Not Sabine, certainly. Her judgment in such matters was… spotty.

She was a Mandalorian who had broken her vows; she was forsworn. She couldn’t stand by her family; she had no family that would acknowledge her now, and her hands were red with their blood anyways, so what could she have said to any of them, if she saw them again? What was there left to do, but survive?

Sometimes, Sabine thought of other Mandalorians in the not-so-distant past who had done as she had, had broken their vows. The civil wars hadn’t been that long before her time; in a way, it hadn’t really stopped until the Siege was lifted at the end of the Clone Wars, and the Empire took control.

_“I remember when the wars ended, Sabine. I was a young woman then, little more than a child. Peace-loving Satine Kryze prevailed, though I doubt she would have done so without the Jedi’s aid. She might have been trained as a warrior, but she lost her spirit for fighting early on, and her clan was decimated during the wars. Without the Jedi, she would have died young, just as her parents did.”_

_“…Mother… Aren’t we supposed to be loyal to whoever wins once the war’s over? …Mother?”_

_“Don’t look at me like that, child; I’m not angry. You are very young; I don’t expect you to know the specifics. If… If the Duchess had remembered our ways, perhaps we would have sworn allegiance to her, and troubled her no more. But she had forsaken everything. She wanted to make us_ weak _, Sabine. She wanted us to turn our backs on everything that makes us what we are, and why? Because she lost people she cared for? So did we all. Not all of us responded by laying down our arms and forsaking everything our parents taught us. We had to fight against that. We could never tolerate a ruler such as her.”_

And from that, had sprung Death Watch. Sabine knew the story well. Both sides of her family, her mother and her father’s clans, were aligned with House Vizsla; even those who were not active members of Death Watch still agreed with and supported what Death Watch represented. If the New Mandalorians, led by Satine Kryze, would provide no legitimate outlet for the warrior culture of Mandalore, Death Watch was not going to be discouraged by that. They would not disarm, and neither would they flee. They would stay and fight, even if they had to fight on the periphery, even if they had to abandon all codes of conduct in how they carried out their new, covert war.

Satine Kryze had lost so much to war that she deemed traditional Mandalorian culture worthless, and tried to rebuild Mandalorian culture from the ground up to be something more peaceable. That was what Sabine had been told. And eventually, Satine had been deposed, and killed. The exact circumstances of her overthrow and death tended to vary, depending on who was giving an explanation. Some named Satine Kryze ‘martyr’, others ‘coward’ and ‘murderer.’ It was very confusing, and Sabine had never been able to figure out which version, if any, was the truth. About the only thing everyone had agreed on was that she was weak. She let her grief turn her away from everything she had been raised to respect, and she couldn’t even maintain a successful regime.

Death Watch refused to give up their lives as warriors, but in the process they became a terror to their own people. Her mother, too. Sabine knew that. She would never have said it to her mother’s face—she wasn’t sure what she feared more, that her mother would shout, or that she’d just crumple—but from what Sabine had learned at the Academy, as far as she could _trust_ what she’d learned at the Academy, it sounded like Death Watch had been little more than a bunch of armed thugs at times.

But Satine had watched the old ways ruin her life and destroy nearly everything she held dear. But Sabine’s mother and everyone else who joined or supported Death Watch had been told to their faces that they must give up everything they had been raised to value. What could you do, when the walls were closing in, and the only way out was to shed bits and pieces of what you’d been raised to treasure, one at a time, until there was little to nothing left?

 _At least they did something. What am I doing?_ Just surviving, she supposed. Funny how surviving didn’t really feel like living.

-0-0-0-

It just figured that it would be one of her _translator_ jobs that got Sabine into deep trouble, rather than a bounty hunting gig.

The job offer came from someone who was trying to negotiate a price on spare ship parts with an Aqualish mechanic. While said mechanic understood Basic just fine, she apparently couldn’t speak more than about five words of it, which would make communication with someone who didn’t understand Aqualish difficult. Hence the need for a translator.

Sabine was approached about a week after she got into the city. This world was a quiet one, and gossip told her that local law enforcement tended to come down extremely hard on any bounty hunters they caught operating in the area, so she started putting out that she could serve as a translator instead. Her prospective client was a human man, about ten years older than Sabine, or perhaps a few years older than that. With brown hair, brown skin, and green-blue eyes, he would have been perfectly nondescript if not for the armor on his right arm and shoulder, but still, when he approached her with his offer, Sabine almost didn’t take it. There was something… shifty about him. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t tell Sabine his name—that was actually pretty normal for the kinds of translation jobs she took—and it wasn’t the normal “I’m a smuggler who’d really like to stay out of jail” kind of shiftiness, either. There was just something off about him, something fake, like his face was a mask concealing something very old and very dangerous underneath.

But in the end, her stomach wound up doing the decision-making for her—her client said they’d go to a nearby diner to hammer out the details if she accepted, and he’d offered to pay for her meal. Sabine hadn’t had a hot-cooked meal out of a restaurant any nicer than a filthy hole in the wall since… She couldn’t really remember. Maybe on Nar Shaddaa. Maybe on Mandalore.

And perhaps even a month ago, she would have ignored the dull ache in her stomach and refused him. But a month ago, she hadn’t been feeling tired all the time, hadn’t felt weak all the time. A month ago, her fingernails were just starting to soften, were just starting to dull, and now, they felt like they’d split if she applied even a little pressure to them. Anemia ran in the family. At home, they tested her fairly regularly, but Sabine had been taught which signs to look out for; she didn’t need a doctor to know that steady food was the best cure available for what was ailing her. She’d take the job.

Of course the job went wrong. Of _course_ it did. Sabine had ignored her own better judgment taking it, after all; that was what she got for letting her stomach do the talking for her. But then, Sabine didn’t exactly expect ‘translation job gone wrong’ to translate to an ambush by the local Imperial garrison, followed by a speeder chase, a foot chase, and a shootout in what she suspected was a strip club (she hadn’t really been paying a whole lot of attention to the dancers, but when she spotted one of them she couldn’t help but stare, just a little bit), all culminating in a fire fight in an open market. That really seemed more like the sort of thing that would happen to a bounty hunter, not a translator.

“You know, for somebody who said you didn’t want anything to do with this,” the man—no, _Kanan_ ; he’d told her his name around the third time a stormtrooper shot at their stolen speeder—called out, “you sure don’t need a lot of encouragement to open fire on stormtroopers.”

He sounded irritated, Sabine thought. He’d told her to run the moment they got to the market and a few more escape routes opened up, but Sabine did _not_ run (she shoved away thoughts of Nar Shaddaa, thoughts of Mandalore), and she really didn’t appreciate being told to run by anyone. So she bristled and snapped, “Maybe I don’t like being shot at.”

From behind their makeshift barricade (a fruit stall that was starting to look more like a sieve), Kanan dropped down to replace the energy cap in his blaster. He paused before resuming fire, raising an eyebrow at Sabine and snorting. “Yeah, kid, I kinda noticed that. But this? This is the Empire we’re talking about, not some drunks in the cantina or a smuggler’s goons.”

“And maybe I don’t like the Empire, either.” One of her shots flew wide of its target, and Sabine snarled. That meal in the diner earlier had definitely left her feeling better, but she was still weaker than she ought to have been, and her aim was suffering for it. At least the troopers’ numbers seemed to be thinning. _And at least their aim is even worse than mine is right now. If these guys were the ISC, they’d already be scraping what was left of us off of the pavement._

Kanan shook his head irritably. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe you’re in over your head? You sure you wanna pick a fight with the Empire?”

“Isn’t that what _you’re_ doing _right now_?!”

“It’s different for me.”

“I fail to see how!”

“Look, kid. Sabine,” he amended, putting a hand on her shoulder even as he continued to rain blaster fire on the troopers. Sabine tried not to flinch. “Once you start fighting the Empire, _really_ fighting, you can’t ever stop. You start _really_ fighting the Empire, and they’ll start coming for you.” There was no trace of irritation or sarcasm in his voice now, no trace of the mocking humor she’d heard while they were being chased. He was deadly serious now, and there was a heaviness in his eyes that probably could have sobered the biggest drunks back on Nar Shaddaa. “There’s no turning back, once you decide to fight.”

Sabine sucked in a deep, shuddering breath, like the first breath a castaway made when surfacing after nearly drowning. She felt like the air would run out at any second. “I want to fight. I don’t know _how_.” The words were spilling out uncontrollably. Her voice was cracking. Sabine was grateful for her helmet; she didn’t want him to see her face. “Fighting the Empire hasn’t gone so great for me,” she said lamely, and there was her shame again, digging talons into her flesh.

Kanan looked at her strangely, silent for what under scrutiny felt like an eternity. When finally he spoke again, he sounded oddly brittle, like glass just before it broke. “You really mean that? All of it?”

“Yes.” No hesitation. She couldn’t hesitate now. Not anymore.

“Then when I make a break for it, you’re with me. I’ve got somebody you need to meet.”

-0-0-0-

That ‘somebody’ was one Hera Syndulla, Twi’lek captain of a modified freighter known as the _Ghost_. Kanan had called ahead of time, but neglected to mention their newest crewmate’s exact age. Hera had glared daggers at Kanan, who threw his hands up and smiled sheepishly back, trying to talk her down with an almost playful air about him. Sabine stared. She couldn’t help it.

Hera shot one last glare at Kanan and turned her attention to Sabine. When their eyes met, she smiled gently, almost apologetically. “Sabine…” Hera had a smooth, sweet voice that reminded Sabine irresistibly of an older girl she had known growing up, and something inside of her ached miserably to hear it. “I appreciate your willingness to help us. I really do. But…” Hera’s brow furrowed, her lekku shivering.

Kanan turned and looked at his captain, eyes narrowed slightly. “Sabine, you said you’d fought the Empire before.” Sabine couldn’t help but notice that his eyes were still locked on Hera’s face, even as he was talking to _her_. “You mind telling us what you meant by that?”

Suddenly, Sabine’s mouth felt as dry as the desert stands on Mandalore. She couldn’t… She didn’t want them to know. _I don’t have to tell them everything. I don’t. It’s not like they’re telling_ me _everything_. “I used to be an Imperial cadet. I… left my world’s Academy.”

“Which I guess explains why you started shooting at those troopers before I did,” Kanan inferred, grimacing.

Meanwhile, Hera nodded firmly, a sheen like ice glossing her bright green eyes. “So what you’re telling me is that joining us won’t make you any more of a fugitive than you already are, am I right?”

“You’d be right, yeah,” Sabine replied, aiming for flippant and landing on flat.

Hera favored her with a confident smile that had beneath it the sort of steel Sabine’s aunt and mother would have approved of. “Then welcome to the team.”

-0-0-0-

This was not a ship of two—or three, Sabine soon discovered. Including herself, the _Ghost_ was a ship of five. Besides Kanan and Hera, there was a Lasat named Zeb (it took Sabine a moment to recognize his species, but when she did, her stomach began earnestly trying to crawl up her throat and out her mouth), and a frankly vicious astromech named ‘Chopper.’ Like, beyond vicious. As in ‘giggled maniacally when their first mission together required him to blow up a ship’ levels of viciousness.  Apparently, he’d been Hera’s since she was a young child. Sabine wondered if Hera had deliberately programed Chopper to be this way, or if that was just the way his personality had naturally developed after a few years with no memory wipes. She couldn’t decide which answer would have been more disturbing.

The _Ghost_ , Sabine was pleased to be able to confirm, was a ship of rebels. Small-time rebels, maybe, but you had to start somewhere, it was better than going back to doing nothing, and Hera said that eventually things would be a bit larger-scale. Figured it would be Hera who said that. Kanan might have been the squad leader on the ground, but it was pretty clear who was really in charge here. It was kind of hard for Sabine to miss on whose word the _Ghost’s_ world turned.

It was easy for Sabine to keep to herself, so long as she wasn’t loud. She’d been given the sole empty crew quartering, and the room, while not large, wasn’t so small that she would have needed to step outside just to feel like she wasn’t suffocating. The rest of the crew generally kept to themselves when they weren’t on a mission or being briefed for a mission. Even when Hera needed somebody or everybody to man stations or perform ship maintenance, there wasn’t a whole lot of idle chatter. Kanan and Hera were the only ones who had a whole lot to do with each other—and Sabine was going to pretend, hopefully until she managed to _actually_ expunge it from memory, the few times she’d spotted one of those two enter the other’s quarters at night, and spotted them leaving again early the following morning.

If the others (mostly) kept to themselves, then Sabine was more than happy to keep to herself too. Somehow, she doubted she’d be with these guys forever. They’d die, or she’d die, or they’d leave her. Seemed pretty clear-cut to Sabine.

A month into this, and Sabine managed to give away more than she meant to. She couldn’t quite remember the lead-up, not in words; blank rage had managed to open up a hole in her memory. It was one of the few times she ate breakfast in the common area instead of in her room (Or outside, if they were planetside instead of flying). Beyond that, she didn’t remember much.

Logically, she knew Zeb had had no idea she was actually a Mandalorian, and hadn’t spoken with any real malice. Logically, Sabine also knew that Zeb was probably strong enough to crush her ribcage the way she’d crush a tin can under her foot, and that maybe picking a fight with him wasn’t such a good idea. And yet, when he made some crack about whoever she’d stolen her armor off of having been unimpressive to have been taken out by someone her age, she still tried to punch him in the face.

Sabine’s fist never actually connected. Kanan had realized what she was going to do before she actually did it, and grabbed her shoulder before she could do anything more than jump out of her seat. That hand on her shoulder anchored her back to herself, and she didn’t lunge forwards, but still, she glared, her breath whistling from between gritted teeth. “I didn’t steal this armor. I made it with my family!” she ground out, her arms fairly shaking with sudden rage.

She couldn’t see Kanan’s face, though he pushed her back down into her seat rather more gently than he could have. Zeb looked more bemused than offended, Hera more stunned than angry. Chopper just waved his manipulator arms and said something to the effect of “Pass the oil!”

Later, when she had had time to cool off, Sabine apologized to Zeb, who just shrugged and told her not to worry about it. Still, that sudden surge of anger had managed to surprise even Sabine. It certainly wasn’t the first time someone had assumed she’d stolen her armor. There’d been plenty of people over the past two years who assumed that ‘bounty hunter’ automatically equated to ‘armor thief.’ Hell, it wasn’t like Sabine had ever bothered disabusing _them_ of that notion; she couldn’t take the risk of them putting things together if they knew that particular fact.

But this time had been different; this time, Sabine _wanted_ them to know the truth. Maybe it was just because, after a month of reasonably steady meals, her anemia symptoms were starting to clear up, and her strength was starting to come back. Maybe the weakness had been on her longer than she thought, and it had started in her heart. Maybe that was all there was to it.

(And still, she wasn’t sure if she even had any right to wear the armor anymore. Maybe it was a kind of theft to still wear it after she’d hurt her family so, after they had turned their backs and cast her out. But it was all she had of home, and it had been freely given when it was made, so she wore it still.)

Not long after that incident, Sabine got another surprise, and whether it was more pleasant than the last, she really couldn’t say.

Hera did not say ‘trust-building exercise,’ though Sabine could definitely tell she was thinking it; that encouraging smile and that hopeful gleam in her eyes fairly screamed Hera’s intentions. That was probably for the best—if Hera had actually _said_ ‘trust-building exercise’ instead of just _thinking_ ‘trust-building exercise’, there was no way Sabine would have gone along with this. As it was, she nearly didn’t go along with it just with Hera merely thinking ‘trust-building exercise.’

But Hera had managed to hit on Sabine’s greatest weakness. Well, maybe not her _greatest_ weakness, exactly. It was her greatest weakness after explosives, art and weapons, so more like her _fourth-_ greatest weakness: languages. Sabine had first come into contact with Kanan (and by extension, the rest of the _Ghost_ crew) as a translator, after all; Hera would have known about her newest crewmate’s facility for languages. Hera’s offer for Sabine was that, in their downtime, she’d teach Sabine Ryl, if Sabine would teach her Mando’a.

_“You’re already serving as a translator here, and it would be good for you to know Ryl if we’re ever in a situation where we need to deal with Twi’leks and I can’t be involved.”_

_“And you want to learn Mando’a because…”_

_“Well, we may need to deal with Mandalorians too, and if you’re not available, it would be good to have someone else who speaks the language.”_

Sabine didn’t mention that both races involved tended to teach their children Basic as a second language alongside their cradle tongue. She didn’t mention that if they ever dealt with Mandalorians in the future, it would probably be better if she _wasn’t_ around, because her presence would probably make any deal break down fast. Instead, she let her curiosity do the talking for her, and nodded. It all seemed innocuous enough.

They didn’t have a whole lot of downtime, but when they did, they monopolized the dejarik table (much to Kanan and Chopper’s disappointment, but they got over it) for use in language lessons. Sabine taught Hera the only way she knew how, the way she had been taught in the Imperial Academy: declension and conjugation and sentence structure and pronunciation guides and vocabulary lists. Hera took a more naturalistic approach, apart from also employing vocabulary lists, more the way Sabine had watched older cousins teach their children to talk.

The first word Hera taught Sabine was ‘freedom.’

The first word Sabine taught Hera was ‘home.’

Progress was… Well… they were making progress. Slowly. Though it irked her to have to admit it, Sabine was much better at learning languages than she was at teaching them. She had a hard time guessing what direction to take next, what was appropriate for a beginning student, and how best to mix different areas of study.

There was also the matter of the particular dialect of Mando’a she had chosen to teach Hera. Sundari Standard was the dialect deemed most appropriate to teach outsiders; it was the most widely used dialect of Mando’a spoken by Mandalorians. The dialect Sabine had chosen to teach Hera instead was the dialect her clan spoke, the one she had learned from her cradle. That dialect was not as widely spoken, and was generally considered one of the most difficult for outsiders to learn, being more conservative and having fairly few Basic loanwords. Communities who spoke it tended to be hostile to the idea of linguistic evolution, with the result that the dialect sounded rather archaic, even to other Mandalorians. Sabine’s dialect and Sundari Standard were mutually intelligible… for the most part. If Hera encountered a Mando’a speaker using Sundari Standard, she’d probably be able to hold a conversation with them, but there was another problem, in that using Sabine’s clan’s dialect would give away immediately that she’d been taught Mando’a by a member of House Vizsla. Any Mandalorian not aligned with House Vizsla would probably take exception to that. Honestly, some Mandalorians who _were_ aligned with House Vizsla might take exception to that.

It didn’t occur to Sabine until too late that it probably would have been better to teach Hera Sundari Standard. She’d just gone with the dialect she was raised with instinctively, and to be honest, she’d always had trouble with Sundari Standard; when she took exams at the Academy and had a choice about whether to use Sundari Standard or Basic, she almost always went with Basic, because her Sundari Standard grammar tended to be a bit lacking, and she didn’t want points docked for clerical errors. Oh, well. It wasn’t like she could just switch dialects this far in.

The oddest thing was, Hera basically admitted the same thing to Sabine about the dialect of Ryl she was teaching her. _“My clan’s dialect is usually considered a bit… difficult.”_ She had laughed ruefully as she explained, _“I’ve been trying to teach you the version for speakers who don’t have lekku or whose lekku are damaged, but there was never a reason for me to know it when I lived on Ryloth, and, well, I’m starting to think any Ryl speaker is going to think you learned the language from a HoloNet translating engine.”_

 _“Hera, I_ can _do this.”_

_“I’m not questioning you; I’m questioning me.”_

This was the, maybe the seventh or eighth lesson they’d met up for. Outside the ship, night had fallen over the city where they were docked, and inside the ship, Kanan and Zeb were asleep, and Chopper was… somewhere. The language lesson was doubling as Hera and Sabine’s watch shift, and they sat in a shallow pool of light illuminating the dejarik table.

“So, is my pronunciation still awful?” Hera asked Sabine wryly, as they pored over their datapads.

Sabine hunched her shoulders. “I never said it was awful, Hera,” she muttered, not quite meeting her eyes—she had been thinking it, even if she hadn’t said it. “I just said it needed work.” When Hera raised a tattooed eyebrow at her and smiled slyly, Sabine went on defensively, “ _Really_ , Hera.” And still ignored the fact that she’d been thinking it. “And honestly, your pronunciation isn’t as bad as mine used to be when I was little. My mother used to…” She trailed off, her shoulders sagging. Her mother used to laugh at her and play a game where she pretended she didn’t know what Sabine was saying, coming up with increasingly ridiculous interpretations until she finally got the pronunciation right. But that had been a long time ago.

“Sabine…” Hera’s hand on her shoulder was a gentle one, and her voice soft and sad, but still, Sabine stiffened, drew up a little, lifted her chin and forced herself to meet Hera’s eyes. Forced herself not to shy away when she saw a little bit of the steel she’d seen before in Hera's eyes, instead of just her mouth. “Sabine, I don’t know how you came to be out here by yourself at your age, away from your family. But whatever it was—“ her voice hardened, the steel sharpening out soft edges “—it was _not_ your fault."

Sabine wanted to push her away. She wanted to leave, and go back to her room, or just leave the ship entirely. She wanted to scream _“How do you_ know _that?!”_ at the top of her lungs, and she could feel those words tattooing themselves on her soft, weak heart even now. She sat very stiff and very still and very silent, staring at Hera with her hands clenched on her knees, and her mouth clamped shut.

Hera gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “This ship is home for me.” Her eyes crinkled upwards as her smile widened slightly. “It’s home for Chopper, and Kanan, and Zeb. What I hope, is that in time it will be home for you as well.”

The home of Sabine’s heart was far, far away from here. Her last memory of home was of snow gently falling from the sky, and her brother waving to her as she boarded the transport that would take her to the shuttle that would take her back to the Academy for the next term. The sky was a soft, pearly gray, and the wind sang a low, quiet song through the trees. But home was far away, home was gone, and Sabine didn’t tell Hera any of that. Instead, she made a motion with her head that certainly wasn’t a nod, and they went back to the night’s lesson.

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone is curious as to why I made Sabine so young when she left the Academy (and I'm aware that future episodes might blow this out of the water), I'd be happy to explain in more detail, but in short, the timeline works out best for me this way.


End file.
